of_troy's relating of the Asimov anecdote reminded me of a pretty funny joke. I'm not sure, maybe you have to be a computer science guy to get a smile out of it.

You need to know a few minor details to understand the joke:1) Niklaus Wirth is one of the luminaries in the field of computer science. His opus "The Art of Computer Programming" (originally intended to be 7 volumes, but curtailed, so far, to only 3) is an important work in the field.2) There are 4 ways of passing arguments to a function (in a program): call by reference, call by name, call by value, and call by value-result. (Sometimes it's called "pass by reference," "pass by name," etc.)

The Joke:One day someone asks Professor Wirth the correct pronunciation of his name and he responds, "Well, you can call me by name which is 'Veert' or you can call me by value, which is 'Worth'."

Uh, maybe this isn't worth knowing, but I still get a chuckle from it, more than 20 years after I first heard it.

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